[490] _D'Ewes' Journal._ Speech of Cecil, 1597.
(a) _The Tenants at Will and the Leaseholders_
We have said above that we cannot measure the extent of the depopulation caused by enclosure, even for those years with regard to which figures are supplied us by Royal Commissions. But, after all, it is happily less important to arrive at an exact statistical estimate of the acres enclosed and of the number of tenants displaced, than it is to get a general view of the economic forces at work and of the structure of legal relationships upon which they operated. Given the economic reasons for the consolidation of holdings which were dominant in the sixteenth century, they could hardly have failed to result in evictions on a considerable scale, unless the tenants themselves had sufficient legal security to hold their own. If they had such security, the statistical analysis of displacements given above will fall into line with the general situation and be a valuable comment upon it. If they had not, then the figures, while a useful guide to the imagination, may stand when they confirm, but hardly when they contradict, the picture given by contemporaries. The accounts of the latter, though still not freed from the charge of exaggeration, will be supported by what we know of the general disposition of economic and legal forces. They probably heighten the colour and sharpen the outlines, but their indication of tendencies will be correct.
In discussing the position of the small cultivator in the sixteenth century it was pointed out above that similarity of legal status was compatible with the greatest economic variety, and in considering their ability to resist attempted eviction it is essential to remember the converse truth, that tenants who were economically in a similar position were often from the point of view of tenure very different. Just as writers of the time lump together all classes of well-to-do small landholders under the name of yeomen, though the majority of them were not legally yeomen at all, so they constantly speak of evictions, ruinous fines, and rack-rents, without discriminating between the different classes of tenants whose different legal positions make them liable to suffer in very different degrees. One must remember, again, that in the sixteenth century a man might be called a copyholder because he held a copyhold tenement, but at the same time he might have, and very often had, additional land which he had leased from the demesne or from the waste, and in which his legal interest was quite different; he might be a freeholder and at the same time be the farmer who leased the lord's demesne, or he might be freeholder, copyholder, and leaseholder in one, and even hold at the will of the lord other land which he had been allowed to occupy "by grant of the court," for example part of the manorial waste. Hence not only were the positions of tenants at will, lessees, and copyholders considered as classes, different from each other, but there was also a difference in the legal interest which individuals had in different parts of the lands which they cultivated. Even if the law gave protection to copyholders, a point to be discussed later, they might suffer from the consolidation into large farms of those parts of their lands which they did not hold by copy, and the more they had gained in preceding years by adding to their holdings of customary land by leasing part of the demesne and of the waste, the heavier would be their loss when these additions were taken from them, while those whose holdings consisted entirely of such encroachments would be altogether ruined. Again, on those few manors where tenure at the will of the lord had not crystallised into copyhold, the tenant's position was even weaker than that of the lessee, for there was nothing but a custom unenforced by legal documents to prevent his eviction.